“I need more experience.”
It’s one of the biggest lies keeping founders from writing the book they’ve always wanted to write. A lie is a story you tell yourself to feel better about avoiding the truth.
It’s the same story you tell yourself when you say you’ll stop watching Netflix after this season, stop doomscrolling on Monday, start eating healthy after the holidays, or finally start working out in January.
Then nothing changes.
You start another season. You’re doomscrolling on Tuesday. You’re still eating and feeling like crap in January, and by February you’re still fat and out of shape.
The same thing happens with the book you’ve been thinking about writing.
You wonder if your story is interesting enough or if you really have something different to say. Instead of starting, you tell yourself you need a little more experience first.
The Cost of Waiting
Meanwhile, another year passes. Then another. And another.
Eventually, you die.
The book remains unwritten, and ideas that could have helped someone else die with you. While you’re alive, the perspective that makes you different stays trapped inside your head instead of becoming something your market knows you for.
This is why memento mori—Latin for “remember you will die”—has become such a powerful reminder for me. Your time is limited, whether you want to think about it or not. We all think we have more time until we don’t. For example, before my father-in-law passed away, I had always wanted to share Joe Dow’s story. We only recorded just 30 minutes of more than 60 years of experience.
Something else happens while you wait. Someone with less experience but more willingness to get uncomfortable and publish starts becoming known for ideas you have spent decades learning, living, and thinking about.
That’s the cost of waiting.
I recently talked with a founder who scheduled a Built Authority Book Blueprint Conversation. He’d been thinking about writing a book for a couple of years, so I asked what was holding him back.
He told me he wanted more results and more experience so he could make the book as good as possible. I hear the same answer from founders with 5–10 years of experience and founders with more than 20.
If you’re a consultant, coach, advisor, or another professional services founder already changing people’s lives through your work, the question becomes: How much more experience do you actually need before you trust yourself enough to share what you already know?
Your Resistance to Publish Is Not About Experience
“I need more experience” usually isn’t about experience.
It’s often about fear as questions start running through your mind:
What if people disagree with me?
What if my story isn’t interesting enough?
What if my perspective changes?
What if I’m wrong?
Those are real questions. They’re also some of the same questions that delayed my first book by seven years.
Notice what happens when those questions start controlling your decisions. Instead of trusting what you’ve experienced, learned, and seen with your own eyes, you begin looking outside yourself for permission to believe you know enough.
That’s where this becomes bigger than writing a book.
Is it time to finally write the book you’ve been thinking about, to tell your story and share your philosophy?
